Graham Greene Quotes - Page 7

The problem of pretending to be alive.

At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.

My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

You cannot love without intuition.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.

Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?

Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.

Love taught me that your honour did but jest.

I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

Doing nothing, badly.

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.